The Goyim Defense League, or GDL, has been banned from almost every social media site. But videos of their stunts find a way online anyway. On a street corner right in front of an Orlando synagogue in mid-Febuary, a group of neo-Nazis did their best to torture Jewish people leaving their place of worship. Filming every moment of their abuse, the group, dressed in Hawaiian-print T-shirts and sunglasses, screamed slurs through a megaphone, threw up Nazi salutes inches away from car windows, and tried to provoke a confrontation with the worshippers. One man, in particular, led the hate. Ad Block Choices “Heil Hitler, you fucking k—-,” he says at the end of the video and preforms a Nazi salute while posing next to a person dressed mockingly as an orthodox Jewish man. Behind him stands a police officer watching the incident take place. The video of the stunts, shared across a variety of social media including Twitter, has now been seen millions of times. The man hurling the vicious antisemitism is Jon Minadeo II, the head provocateur of a collective dubbed the Goyim Defense League (GDL), a mocking take on the Jewish civil rights group Anti-Defamation League mixed with the term for non-Jew in Hebrew. Over the past several years, Minadeo has made himself into something of an e-celeb among the far-right through his trolling and terrorizing of the Jewish community. He’s posed as a transgender activist at a city council meeting, been racist to people he encounters on Omegle (a Chat Roulette-esque site), and spearheaded tours with other racist internet celebrities. Minadeo also films most of his escapades and posts them on the network’s personal video sharing website, which then directs viewers to an online store where they can purchase racist merchandise—like Hitler masks and “swastika soap”—or donate to the prolific trolls. Joshua Fisher-Birch, an analyst with the Counter Extremism Project, described the network as an “extremely antisemitic street theater troupe,” whose primary goal is generating as much attention as possible, no matter the damage to their targets. “They need to have this churn of content that they put out there to keep their audience interested and to keep eyes on them,” said Fisher-Birch. “They’re doing stuff constantly.”
via vice: A Neo-Nazi Troll Network Is Making Money Abusing Jews